busybee fluffy rambles

Back in 2016, when Trump was first elected, so many people around me were despondent and telling me that they should just kill themselves before the rest of the world did it for them. Why should they bother going on, in a world that just wanted them dead anyway?

This is why I wrote Strategies to Live, especially the final verse:

In the long run everything will be fine
It will just be a matter of time, in
Twelve billion years this will all be gone

In the meantime, please¹ try to survive
The world is better with you alive
Outliving him is a reason to go on

It took me unti 2021 to finally release it on an album, and I perhaps didn’t do as good a job of it as I could have since I felt like it was no longer relevant. Now that it’s relevant again I end every set that I can with it.

I’ve been going to physical therapy for vestibular rehabilitation for a few weeks, and right now I have good days and I have bad days when it comes to vertigo. Today was a bad day.

On the plus side, even on my bad days I seem to be able to drive, at least within town, without having a vertigo-induced panic attack. Maybe I’ll be able to start driving to choir again soon. And also finally go to Costco in person instead of paying for delivery for everything.

Okay so here’s what was being replaced:

The wall tile was way too thick (and was poorly-installed at that), there was no bullnose around the edges, it didn’t line up with the edges of the tub, and it led to a perfect little storm of condensation trickling down and saturating the drywall in that weird little gap between the tile and the tub.

Wellp, the latest bathroom situation is something that could have been a lot less expensive, if I’d been a bit more willing to get some proper diagnosing this time around. I still think it’s a good thing that this work is getting done, but gosh, things didn’t have to go this way.

This video about cutting down on phone dependency has been making the rounds:

I have some thoughts about it.

I’ve been accepted into Furality’s Dealer’s Den as a musician! I have a month to get my booth together and I’ve already got it like 90% done. It’s actually in an acceptable state already but there’s some more little things I want to do with the background video, and I’m learning so much DaVinci Resolve stuff to do it.

I also have a show on Sunday, at around 4:30 PM PDT. I hope folks can make it!

Okay, it turns out that there was a lot of hidden magic on the SOMA Connect image that was infeasible to try to migrate/clone over myself, both due to dependencies on how the old-ass Raspbian image is setup in terms of networking, and a whole bunch of random/hidden scripts that do who-knows-what. So I decided to take a different approach, and modify the SOMA Connect image instead.

Last time I had a sorta-working shairport-sync configuration on my Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t have the SOMA Connect hardware actually working, and I had to make a bunch of compromises in order to get things to even try to start up without reimaging to the 32-bit Raspbian operating system.

Well, somehow the filesystem got corrupted and the device was refusing to boot, so I figure this is as good a time as any to document how I got things working in a much nicer way.